09.05.11
Where to begin?
Wow. What a wild year it’s been!
Have you all been checking back regularly for new blog posts and exciting updates? I can’t imagine you have, but IF you have been, then I apologize. Profusely.
Tina and I recently went to a dinner at a friend’s house. All of our friends are kind, patient and understanding of the fact that they really only see us between September and March and when they do, we’re going to talk vineyard, wines or winery. It probably helps that I grossly exaggerate the net worth of both myself and my family and our overly generous nature. It’s really a victimless crime, having friends keeps Tina happy.
So back to the dinner party when one of our less wary friends actually asked me “Glenn, how are things going?” Somewhere in the full history of civilization, our vineyard and all the trial and tribulations of my year I uttered the profound remark: “You know, Tina and I still make the same amount of effort every year, but we’re really accomplishing more and more each time.” I know, profundity comes at the oddest of moments. I actually hesitated after I uttered this truly brilliant tidbit and was a little surprised that my buddy wasn’t commenting on my wisdom. But then I noticed that he had deftly replaced himself with a coatrack from beside the entranceway and he was sitting with all the other guests at the dinner table finishing up dessert while I engaged the owner’s winter coat in conversation. Undeterred, I sat at the table and repeated myself, much to our friends’ great delight that I was returning the conversation back to me.
My point, of course, is that every year I try and come up with new excuses for not keeping this blog up to date and this year’s is efficiency and streamlining. To get done all the new things that needed doing with the same amount of effort that we’ve been giving, it’s necessary to both be more efficient and cut corners where we can. So, that’s this year’s excuse and my usual long-winded build up to it.
This year started with planting another acre of vines. 1/2 acre of Cabernet Sauvignon and 1/2 acre of Petit Verdot. You all may recall that March and April of this year were pretty wet months. As we didn’t like the way the tractor auger had dug the holes two years ago, we had planned on diging the holes by hand the week before the planting. It was a little challenging to get those dug around the bad weather and the rainy forecasts also cut down significantly on the number of volunteers that came out (hey, I don’t blame them, I’m surprised anyone volunteers at all!). Fortunately we had some family and a couple of less weather aware folks come out and we were able to get the entire planting done within our target window (albeit barely).
The other side of the wet spring was that it made it both VERY important to start this year’s spray program AND very difficult to actually spray in my schedule. I implemented our program a little late, then turned around and aggressively caught it up. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch it up until after bloom when the fruit has started to show up and had a chance to get early infection from multiple diseases. Although the vines looked beautiful through most of the season, the fruit began to show signs later on. There really is no way to go back and undo that kind of mistake, so we had to do the best we could to limit the damage.
I worked with Miziho Nuta at Virginia Tech to try and identify all that we were seeing and how best to address it. It started off pretty slowly, Phomopsis, or cane and leaf spotting, was the first symptom we saw. That’s addressed by Mancozeb and sulfur, which is the heart and soul of my spray program, so it had already been mitigated. Black rot was the next sign to show and was more damaging but also treated by sulfur, so as mitigated as I could get it. The early onset powdery mildew was more difficult. None of my sprays treat PM, so by the time I saw it had been there, I was lucky the hot dry weather had set and taken care of it. I still added a prophyte spray just to play it safe.
Those three diseases coming in just as the fruit came out REALLY impacted us this year and we spent a good bit of the season cleaning and dropping bad clusters. Cutting out bad sections when we could, but dropping whole clusters when we couldn’t. I’d rather drop it all then try and make wine from bad fruit.
Later the year gave us a few more surprises. Downy mildew became prevalent and I was slow to address it because I’d never had it before. Then just as we got all of these under control, we saw some late season rot come in. I had never seen that before either and didn’t have checmicals on hand to fight them. I made an anxious call to Jim MacKenzie late on a Sunday night and he managed to get my order included with the Monday delivery and I was spraying that week.
Long and short of it – we fought all season to get the cleanest fruit we could. We had buyers interested in our Petit Verdot this season, but that was the hardest hit and I couldn’t bring myself to even offer to sell what we had. We dropped almost all of it and will make home wine with whatever little bit can be salvaged.
The other varieties did a little better. Our aggressive program is giving us much lower yields then we originally estimated. We pulled 608 lbs of Viognier and are hoping for ~1k pounds of Cab Franc. We’re working with one of our neighbors to make our wine and they even said the Viognier we did bring in looked good. The brix count was 24 the Thursday before we harvested, but as we raced Hurricane Irene to take the fruit, the extra rain had the brix at 23 when we pressed.
Tina and I have already agreed that we’ll make the best wine we can from this year’s fruit, but if it’s no good, we’ll dump it all and postpone our opening another year. We’d like to meet our 2013 goal, but we won’t open (or serve after we open) bad wines. It’s just not our way and not why we’re getting into this business.
On the winemaking front, we ordered a 300 liter stainless steel, variable capacity tank for our whites, two primary fermentors and 3 oak barrels for our reds that are all at Narmada to make our “professional” wines with this year. We also bought a crusher/destemmer for our home winemaking. It’s the heaviest grade we could easily get delivered to the house and can be a small capacity backup once we get a professional winery built.
Last note this round: we’ve updated and reformatted the website. There’s newer info on the home page and we’re using photo galleries instead of having to add dozens of pictures to a long blog entry like this. We hope this makes the site more usable.
Enjoy!
-grm-
